As pointed out in previous comments, there are virtual dice available online if you don’t happen to have the right polyhedrons just lying around. This said, I have faith in the essential geekiness of my audience.

Continuing last week’s experiment in randomly generated storytelling, here is another tool for your writerly toolbox. There are fewer possible outcomes this time, but the results are more genre-specific:

Hello. It’s been too long. A How To Write Badly Well book has now been put together and is with the publisher. I will, of course, keep you updated. In the meantime, I thought we could try something a bit different.

Authors are asked all the time where their ideas come from. Usually they mumble something about scenic walks or reading the newspaper, then mention the title of their book again and glance meaningfully towards a bookshop. In an attempt to answer this tricky question once and for all, I have decided to turn storytelling into a quantifiable science (this has, in fact, been done before – see Vladimir Propp). To this end, I present the first in a series of handy tools for the muse-averse writer: